Op-Ed: Murphy must veto anti-safety, anti-affordability, & anti-immigrant e-bike bill

In an editorial, Princeton University MPA candidate and Hudson County resident Maya Pontón Aronoff gives her take on why Gov. Phil Murphy should veto the e-bike registration bill that has reached his desk.

Late Monday night in a lame duck session, the NJ legislature rushed to pass a strange piece of legislation against the unanimous opposition of advocacy groups in every committee hearing: S4834/A6235.

This bill lumps all bikes with motors into the same classification, and requires anyone who rides them to get a driver’s license and an insurance policy.

Governor Murphy must veto this bill, which does nothing to improve road safety but creates serious environmental, economic, and racial injustices.

In Hudson County, my home and an area with some of the highest biking rates in the country, this bill is basically a ban on ebikes for working families.

Right now, low-speed e-bikes that go under 20mph sensibly don’t require licenses, while faster e-motos and mopeds already require a user to be 15 years old and licensed with registration and insurance.

The Motor Vehicle Commission largely has not had the capacity to enforce that, however. Rather than address enforcement or education around existing laws, this bill confuses the issue, lumping low-speed e-bikes together with high-speed devices.

From a speed and safety perspective, there’s no difference between regular bikes and low-speed e-bikes, meaning they are quite safe–especially relative to cars, which are much larger and travel at much higher speeds.

E-bikes are necessary for the disabled and elderly, or for delivery drivers spending all day feeding Hudson County, and those who can’t afford a car and car insurance.

And they reduce congestion, air, and noise pollution! We want more people to have access to them, and streets that accommodate them.

This legislation would make e-bikes too expensive for myself and many in my community. 15% of people in Hudson County live below the poverty line; 53% of Union City and Jersey City residents are rent-burdened.

Nearly half of Americans find basic necessities–like housing, groceries, utilities, and transportation–difficult to afford. Now deliveristas just trying to make a living have to pay for insurance?

Even for those who can afford insurance, this bill creates a massive administrative burden and puts our communities at risk of over-policing, fines, fees, and even criminal charges.

How will a police officer know whether or not a bike is licensed and insured? This creates an excuse to have a stop-and-frisk type policy against bikers, which like traffic stops would likely disproportionately impact Black and brown communities.

According to the Vera Institute, fines and fees impact people in poverty, creating cycles of debt and incarceration. Just one missed payment or court date, and now someone is catching a warrant for failure to appear.

The timing of this bill is especially dangerous as ICE is terrorizing our communities on a daily basis. Even just one traffic ticket can flag someone for ICE.

It is estimated that a total of 4,000 people were kidnapped in NJ between May and October, and advocates are aware of at least 60 people taken from Hudson County and surrounding areas since then.

Recently, one of the people kidnapped from Union City, Luis Beltran Yanez–Cruz, died in ICE detention in California; another man, Jean Wilson Brutus, died in Delaney Hall.

While the Immigrant Trust Act package awaiting Governor Murphy’s signature would correctly restrict the license and third-party surveillance data that NJ institutions can
share with ICE directly, it is not yet clear whether federal agencies will still be able to access some of this data indirectly through the surveillance companies themselves (like Flock).

This is not the time to be risking exposing our communities to more surveillance and court contact by requiring them to get additional licenses just to ride a bike.

For these reasons, this bill was unanimously opposed by various advocacy groups: ranging from transportation advocacy organizations (like Hudson County Complete Streets), to immigrant rights groups (such as the NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice and Resistencia en Acción), environmental organizations (such as Climate Revolution Action Network), to corporations like Citibike concerned their industry would be devastated. So why did it get passed, and why so quickly?

The logic of this legislation appears to be, the bikers are the reason we have bike crashes, and if only bikers have to get a license and insurance, we won’t have these tragedies.

But in almost all of the over 500 traffic fatalities we suffered in NJ last year, a car or truck was involved.

The legislation does nothing to address the dangers of large motor vehicles, does not offer education on safer bike use, or provide structural changes like bike lanes.

I can’t see a single way that this legislation would increase safety for anyone on the road.
I don’t believe the problem is the bikers, and it won’t be solved by a license.

The problem is the lack of education on existing laws around high-speed motos, and that most of our cities and towns are built to accommodate cars. This makes biking dangerous for everyone, but most of all bikers.

While it is more difficult to change the structure of our car-centered cities, this is what is necessary to have truly safer, greener, more affordable streets.

The answer is not misguided legislation that targets communities that rely on safe, low-speed e-bikes. Governor Murphy must sign veto this counterproductive legislation.